1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system. More particularly, the present invention provides a conferencing system using only the participants' telephony devices and without an external conference server.
2. Description of Related Art
Telephone or audio conferencing allows three or more people to participate in a single telephone conversation. Each person is able to hear all the other callers when they speak and the conversation can progress as if all the callers were in the same room. Existing conferencing models include an external conferencing server model, a single end point mixing model, and a full mesh conferencing model.
FIG. 1 illustrates a typical external conferencing server model. The external conference server model is the most common conference model used in the enterprise environment. The external conferencing server model provides a centralized conference server 102, wherein the conference server is an external machine. Each participant (104, 106, 108) in the conference makes use of a well-known center point, e.g., conference server 102, to join the conference. However, a drawback to this centralized approach is that this model is expensive to implement due to its large bandwidth and hardware computing power requirement.
FIG. 2 illustrates a single end point mixing model. In this model, every participant (202, 204, 206) to the conference makes use of a known center point among the conference participants (i.e., conference server 208) to join the conference. The center point may be a phone device (e.g., telephone, personal computer, etc.) that a participant used to join the conference. This central point itself functions as the conference server.
The single end point mixing model is typically found in the current PC gaming environment. As some phone devices support 3-way calling, a player may first download the conference server software into the player's PC. Then, the player offers other players to use the player's PC as a conference server. However, this internal conference server approach suffers from a number of limitations. First, a large amount of bandwidth in both directions (upstream and downstream) is required for the conference server PC network connection. Second, the internal conference server approach demands a large amount of CPU power for the voice mixing operations. Third, the internal conference server approach has a scalability problem due to the current asymmetrical bandwidth ADSL and cable networking environment, wherein the upstream bandwidth is very small compared with the bandwidth in the downstream direction. Moreover, a modem dial up connection will usually not have sufficient bandwidth to support the internal conference server model.
FIG. 3 illustrates a typical full mesh conferencing model. In this model, each participant (302, 304, 306, 308) multicasts their voice stream to all other participants in the conference. Each participant's phone device is used as a mixing device. However, use of this model is limited due to the lack of multicast support across the current Internet. It is currently very difficult to make the multicast generally available across the Internet.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method, apparatus, and computer instructions for providing an improved conferencing system using only the participants' telephony devices and without an external conference server.